With regards to venture capital/startup economics and not
nightlife, quality of restaurants, and the existence of an
actually-functional public transportation system (even though
these are all important):

Direct access to Madison Avenue ad agencies and brands. This
is one of the big comparative advantage points for east coast
brand management and ad-tech companies like Buddy Media.

An arguably closer affinity with consumer products and
traditional retail. You have a much larger labor market in NYC
for executives and strong individual contributors with experience
in luxury goods, retail, and in some cases physical supply chain
management for these industries.

A potentially less-competitive recruiting environment for
young technical talent. Both NYC and San Francisco / Silicon
Valley have access to regional schools with strong computer
science and engineering programs. But the startup demand for
these graduates in California is much higher due to a much larger
startup ecosystem - nearly 3x New York City's by some
accounts. The smaller size of NYC's ecosystem means a lower
demand for young engineers, which (holding the supply of said
engineers constant) leads to a less-competitive recruiting
environment and a lower cost per engineer.

Wall Street. It's arguably easier to find a personal
connection to someone at a major bank or east coast hedge fund in
NYC than it is in San Francisco. Fintech startups focused on B2B
in these areas might thus benefit from more high-quality leads.
Also, finding and closing candidates with high finance experience
is probably going to be easier in NYC given the abundance of
young high-churn banking and PE workers.

All of these points apply just as much for investors as
they do for startups. There are a lot of VCs on the east coast
with a strong background in consumer products, fintech, and
adtech that are based in NYC. Similarly, the strategic investment
arms for major east coast financials and east coast brands are
also heavily represented in NYC.

We asked Manoske in an email whether he thought New York
was ultimately better for entrepreneurship. He said he wouldn't
go that far:

I think there isn't an absolute "better" or "worse" for VCs
when it comes to geography. San Francisco and Silicon Valley
certainly have many regional benefits due to the sheer size of
their entrepreneurial community. But many other areas of the
country - NYC being one of them - benefit from having unique
characteristics conducive to building certain kinds of businesses
there.

I covered this a bit in my question, but it's arguably easier to
build some kinds of ad tech, consumer internet, and fin tech
companies in NYC. The price economics of other critical resource
markets (i.e.: hiring engineers) is also
potentially better in NYC
due to the smaller and less culturally/economically-dominant tech
sector in places like Manhattan and Queens.

Where successful companies go, VCs will follow. If you're a VC
focused on tech sectors that do very well in NYC for any of the
above reasons, it makes a lot of sense to set up shop
somewhere very far east of
Sand Hill Road. And you can probably do pretty well there too.